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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#231

Post by John23832 »

packetlost wrote: post #157
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value. Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.

Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#232

Post by FactoryReboot »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

No. Choose the other FAANG offer

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#233

Post by red-iron-pine »

colmmacc wrote: post #190
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a b…

> But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.

aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#235

Post by rvz »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).

Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:

1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.

2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.

3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.

They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#236

Post by [deleted] »

strivingtobe wrote: post #189
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

Money, mostly. But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundr…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#238

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now.

The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about.

“You can pretend to work somewhere else”

Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#239

Post by simoncion »

wojciii wrote: post #185
Plasmoid wrote: post #68

I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".

On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support? Is this an American corporate thing?

> Is this an American corporate thing?

It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#240

Post by burningChrome »

supergeek133 wrote: post #146
pton_xd wrote: post #10

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics. Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more. This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

This is a very important distinction.

At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.

I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.

I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.

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